Rosa Choque - Girl Power

Hanging here in the closet, while she dies, the red dress of Maria�s mother, like a wound in the row of darkness and the old clothes that she used during her life.

They had called me at home and I knew, when I saw her, that she would not last any longer.

When I saw the dress, I said: "Why so pretty mother! I had never saw you dressed with it "

"I never dressed it. I would like to undo one or two lessons before going, if it is that I can."

I seated close to her bed and she sighed so deeply that I thought that she wouldn�t support.

"Now that I am already going I can see some things. Oh, I did not teach you the right thing, but I taught you the wrong ones."

"Mother, what do you want to say with this?"

"Well, I always thought that a good woman would never have her turn. That�s to be a good woman meant to be doing things for another person. Do this, do that, always guarantee what everybody wants and be sure that you will be the last one of the line. Who knows one day you will be able to reach them, but it is clearly that you will never do this. My life was like that, doing for your father, doing for your brothers, your sisters and you."

"You did everything what a mother could do."

"Oh, Maria, Maria, this wasn�t good for you nor for him. Don�t you see? I made the worse mistake. I never asked anything for me! Your father, in the other room, astonished and looking fixed at the walls, when the doctor said to him, it received it badly. He came to my bedside and everything he could do was to shake the rest life out of me. ' You cannot die, do you hear? What will be of me? What will be of me ' I know that it will be hard when I am gone. He not even can find the baked bread, you know.�

"And for you, sons and daughters, I was everybody�s slave, everywhere. I was the first one to wake up and the last one to lie down, seven days in the week. I see how some of yours brothers treat their wives now and this makes me bad, because I was that one who taught to this to them. And they had learned that a woman only must exist to give. Because each penny that I could save was for their clothes, for books of them, even though wasn�t necessary.

I can�t remember only one single time when I went to the city to buy something pretty for me. Except for the passed year, when I got that red dress. I discovered that I had twenty dollars that weren�t destined to any special thing. I would use them to buy remedies, but some how I came bak home with this big box. Your father, then, said something that brought me back to reality. ' Where would you go using a thing such as this, in soap opera or something like it? He was right, I think. I never used this dress, unless in the store.

"Oh, Maria, I always thought that if you don�t take anything of this world for you, that you would have everything in the next. I don�t believe in this anymore. I find that God wants us to have some thing. Here and now and, I am saying, Maria to it, if some miracle could take me off this bed, you would see a different mother, because I would be different. Oh, I left the opportunities escape for so long, that I would badly know how to take advantage of them now. But I would learn, Maria, I would learn."

Hanging here in the closet, while she dies, my mother�s red dress, like a wound in the row of darkness and the old clothes she used during her life.

Source.: �Mudando o Mundo: A Lideran�a Feminina no S�culo 21 (Changing the world: Female leadership in the 21st Century) pages 159 to 161� , Adaptation from �Millie's Mother red Dress�, by Anita Canfield, �Self-Steem for the Latter-Day saint Women�, in Oxfam Handbook for Gender Education 1999.